In brief

• AI’s impacts on strategy, talent, and risk make it essential for boards to adapt their oversight approaches.
• The board’s guidance is key to helping companies harness AI for growth, maintain needed skills, and drive accountability for AI’s uses and outputs.
• Leading boards can fulfill this responsibility by adopting new ways to engage with management, embed AI into oversight, and keep current with AI developments.

Picture this: You’ve just opened your favorite news site to catch up on today’s hot topics. You’re pleased to see a feature article suggesting that your company’s new AI-powered services have poised it for rapid growth. However, you’re taken aback by a headline about another company’s corporate scandal involving the failure to check inaccurate AI-generated information. There’s also an editorial voicing concerns that AI could lead to mass unemployment—a sore spot for you, since the board you sit on has just reviewed a management proposal to cut more than a third of the junior workforce “because now we can do it with AI.”

Events like these are emblematic of how AI is driving significant change on many fronts. Below, we explore three shifts that boards should consider—and how these shifts require directors to challenge old assumptions about how they engage with management, with each other, and with the world around them.